Farmer Diaries

Boeing were fools in their attempt to freeze Bombardier's C series aircraft out of the US market (and possibly many more), it was done in a way that almost certain to fail, for commercial reasons, since for the tariff to apply on the C-Series Boeing had to show it suffered harm.  the only play was political, which is why Bombardier thought they would lose. Boeing's errors: 1) Mischaracterisation of the aircraft segment 2) Subsidy directly harmed Boeing  3) Boeing refused to disclose it's launch customers discount First Boeing, insisted that the aircraft was a 2,900nm 130-150 seat category aircraft, deliberately leaving the Embraer aircraft because it was only a 2,880nm range aircraft.  By doing this they were able to say that the Bombardier aircraft was in the US$ 70 million range instead of the US$ 30 MM range.  That was a huge, huge lie and the USITP saw through this very easily -- especially when Embraer insisted that their aircraft d...

For an entirely different reason, I was looking at the murder rates in Mexican cities Vs. American cities.  Mexico City compares very well with the largest American cities at about 8.4/100,000 so that's ok.  Out of curiosity, I looked at school shooting statistics (following the recent spate of school shootings), I looked at the figures around the world.  To say that the numbers for America were shocking would be a massive understatement.  First, lets for a minute discount school shooting prior to 1920.   Even then it makes no difference.  Canada:  (pop 35 million)   44 people killed in school shootings (1881-2018) Mexico:  (pop 120 million ) 5 people killed in school shootings (2011-2018) Europe:  (pop 300 million)  120 people killed in school shootings (1913-2018) America: (pop 350 million)  68 people were killed in school shootings...in the past 14 months... here   When I first started looking a...

In 2013, the Mexican government enacted its Energy reform law that should for ever, change the face of the country’s energy markets.   Strictly speaking, the process has been a real success as the markets now prepare to take over the country’s growth away from the regulated monopolies that were CFE (electricity) and PEMEX (oil and gas) and bring Mexico to cutting edge of energy sector from a mid-century (corporatist) system. In truth, Mexico no longer had the means of its expansion.   State monopolies were at some level extremely efficient, but at others inefficient.   These firms were long used as means of providing sinecures to the party faithful, they had bloated administrations that were too slow to changes in the demand/supply matrix. Moreover, as Mexico itself changes its power providers were poorly equipped to meet the country’s growing (and changing patterns) of energy demand.   At the same time, the country made a commitment to reduce its carbon foo...

Well, now you all know the difference between market and intrinsic value!  Bitcoin is down to $9,400 -- so a far cry from its US$ 20,049 peak price in January.  It also makes some degree of sense, because the only thing giving bitcoin value is the fact that others want it.  Once sentiment shift, the buyers simply disappear, liquidity dries up and the price continues to fall because there's always a price that clears the trade.  However, there's an old trader saying:  "Don't try to catch a falling knife"  In terms of size, lets just say that the stock market annual price rise is, on average, 7% (sometimes more sometimes less), the rise of bitcoin over the past 18 months has been in the range of 4,500%. There is simply no precedent -- aside from the Tulip Mania (shame more people didn't see that movie, there was a real parable fo our time there). On a different tack; based on these two indicators the market is now in that stratosphere: ...

saw that today in the Apple store:  Puck a Canadian App so that your Beer league (its a thing) can find and hire a hockey goaltender.  Apparently, it’s a huge problem, since many teams only have one goalie and sometimes he’s just not available for the game...with this App you can hire a temp goalie — the App works in most Major Canadian cities I mean, you don’t need more proof that Canadians are hockey-mad Funny

I already said everything I had to say about Cryptocurrency but yesterday's announcement that Kodak was launching its own cryptocurrency saw the stock of the company jump 70%...all that on an announcement of something to come! Also, yesterday Buffet announced that he would bet against all cryptocurrency -- in the form of a 5 year short.  One thing for sure don't bet against the Sage of Omaha. It remains that there is a frenzy out there which in no way matches the reality of Cryptocurrency -- bet you that within 12 months there will be calls for fraud investigations. Anyway

Allow me to add my voice to the discussion about Cryptocurrencies and blockchain. While the former is an interesting economic phenomenon, the other is both the application of the very old concept to a new medium and a very exciting development. Let’s start with blockchain which is, in my opinion, the more interesting of the two: at its simplest level blockchain is a list of buyers and seller of a specific item -- blockchain's innovation is that (a) there are thousands of identical lists for each item that are disseminated across the world but are updated instantaneously -- the impact is a reduction of risk of fraud, and (b) its free! This is important stuff because the trick with fraud is to alter the ownership chain, but with thousands of identical lists, it’s impossible to update them all, and a fraud will be quickly revealed. The question is always the same -- in what kind of transaction can blockchain be used? There are many from stock transfer to other types of securities...